UNF students David Williams (left) and Steven Miltiades sift through oyster shells found at a 1,000-year-old site looking for artifacts such as pottery remnants.

It’s a simple piece of handmade clay pottery, dug from a pile of oyster shells on a buggy bluff, where the people who left it there got most of what they needed from the waters of the nearby marsh.

But with every piece like it, Keith Ashley gets a little closer to helping to figure out more about the people who lived there 1,000 years ago, their social lives and political alliances and trading patterns. They were more than simple, insular people, he believes — instead they were part of a vast trading network that stretched as far as Lake Superior.

“A lot more was going on politically,” he said. “It wasn’t just a bunch of Indians sitting around fishing.”

As evidence, look to the pattern on that piece of pottery: It’s identical to that made by tribes of Indians in middle Georgia, hundreds of miles away. So was this bowl traded to the people who lived in what’s now Jacksonville? Or was it made locally, perhaps by women from Georgia who joined an allied Florida tribe?

Radiological testing on the pottery fragment will determine the origin of the clay used to make it, said Ashley, an archaeology professor at the University of North Florida.

That will be another clue, added to the clues that come one by one, sifted out of the oyster shells by a team of UNF students who have cleared an area inside the Theodore Roosevelt Area of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve.

It’s at one of the highest points in the park, overlooking the marsh. The shells are arranged in an arc-like shape, like those found in several other sites in North Florida and South Georgia. But was this a village, a place for ceremonial rites, or just a simple trash pile

“There’s a reason these people came here,” said Barbara Prettyman, archaeological technician at the national park. “We just need to figure that out.”

Testing shows the area dates to between 900 and 1250. So far, searchers have found nothing exotic there. Just ancient garbage: oyster shells, bowl fragments (some with food still encrusted on them) and the bones of fish, turtles and birds.

It’s worth looking though, as the site dates to the same time as the rich burial mounds and ceremonial sites of nearby Mill Cove.

That’s where archaeologists of the 1890s found arrowheads and jewelry and artifacts from the Appalachians, the Ozarks, St. Louis and the Great Lakes.

After 1250 though, the trading over wide areas seemed to stop. Ashley believes the pacts between various Southeastern chiefdoms must have crumbled by that time, leading to raiding parties and battles, not trades.

“Prehistory is a lot more complex than people think,” he said. “It was a pretty dynamic and volatile landscape.”